You try turning on the telly, reclining gingerly against the too many pillows. (Why does everywhere have too many pillows? Even places with no sink and holes in the shower stall have too many pillows, when surely they could be investing their pillow budget in mousetraps and bleach?) You mumble that maybe there’ll be something on pay-per-view with some hot and heavy plotting or perhaps an achingly wide range of inspirational characterisation and credible psychology – it’s not an ideal option, but perhaps it’ll slap some ginger and mojo into your mood.
It doesn’t – possibly because pay-per-view tends only to offer vampires, men who blow things up, young people with impossible skins intent upon falling in love and/or being murdered and nurses/air hostesses/dancers with surprisingly repetitive personal lives. You abandon artificial stimulations and potter off to the tiny bathroom – perhaps a shower will relax you – if you can ignore the fact that there seems to be eyebrow hair everywhere. (Finding other people’s pubic hair in bathroom areas is, naturally, unpleasant, but somehow much less disturbing than finding what amounts to handfuls of what is clearly eyebrow hair.) Meanwhile, your novel rests sullenly on the bed, peering at you as if you are the worst mistake it has ever made and it may throw up if you touch it.
Yes, the Dark Night of the Soul had arrived. Well, Dark Night Number One – there are usually several. This one involved page 153 – all the other pages weren’t helping, but 153 was especially off-putting – plus unwise accommodation, a hideously nervous stomach which was preventing me from eating and sleeping (two things I enjoy), a number of oncoming onerous tasks for 2011, a marked inability to focus when trying to read illuminated signs and the complete failure of EVERYONE to email or call as and when expected. No sleep, no food, novel-wrestling and radio silence from all manner of previously lovely, useful and important folk left me surveying the ruins of my career within minutes, envisaging a sad and unremarked death up an alleyway in Streatham, my withered corpse later consumed by feral badgers. Before the day was out I was chewing my own ankles for relief.
I came home. I got an eye test. (I now need glasses – just a bit – for illuminated signs and, if it’s small, the telly.) I went to the doctor and scored a prescription for stomach-pacifying medication. EVERYONE got back in touch. I sat in my comfy chair and stared at page 153 until it giggled and scampered up to stroke my brow in the manner that (unlikely though it may seem) I find irresistible.
This does not, of course, mean that all is well – or that page 153 is in any way readable – but at least my pages and I are trundling along once again, holding hands and looking at pictures of beach resorts where we could stay, if we didn’t mind the fact that we would kill each other before the initial sunset’s end.
And we are actually heading for foreign parts, Dear Readers. Should everything go to plan – and I needn’t say that I anticipate it won’t – then we will soon be aiming for the US and Canada. As my novel and I are both phobic about air transport, this will involve a boat, a number of trains and then another boat – all spread out over a significant period. The cost of travelling this way means that my entire tour will only break even, but does also mean that my entire stomach won’t combust, I won’t become hysterically blind and I won’t find myself unable to write even a postcard for the duration of my residence abroad, deafened as I would be by the internal monologue which – trust me, I’ve heard it before – runs as follows: What’s the point of typing anything if the plane’s wings are going to fall off as you try to get the novel home, or the tail fin is compromised, or the rudders get jammed, or there’s clear-air turbulence, or a head-on collision, or all of those other things you’ve studied on Air Crash Investigation? Why would you bother when it’s hard to write books and you could be concentrating on drawing up your will and being nice to toddlers and puppies in ways that mean your afterlife – should you get one – will be moderately comfy and not conducted in a small, brown hotel room, filled with eyebrow hair not your own and a vile-tempered novel.
Which is where I came in. Except that – forgive us – me and the pages are currently not unhappy and, in fact, are heading off at this point for a little time together where you can’t follow. We have some issues to work out. Onwards.
XXXIII
THE POST BELOW was written soon after I celebrated middle age by discovering that I needed glasses. Much of the stress mentioned was, in fact, caused by the previously mentioned ulcer and its associated difficulties.
Dear Readers, I am outside at the back of a cabin in New York State with – I kid you not – a crimson dragonfly perched attractively on the top right-hand corner of my laptop. I am wearing my glasses, which means the surrounding trees are now so in focus that they’re mildly trippy (the dragonfly, at this point, is getting it on with another dragonfly . . . ah, nature . . .), and much is well with my world. Over the last few months I was aware – especially when I caught sight of myself in shop windows and other cruelly reflective surfaces – that I was slightly stressed. Slightly blurry and slightly stressed. I am now unblurry and unstressed to the extent that I realise my spine was actually making arrangements to slip away in the night if I cranked it up any nearer to playing high C every time I acquired a new unease. It is, apparently (and who could have guessed) not quite possible to pinball around the UK and Europe while writing slivers of journalism and essays and doing spots of teaching and stand-up and a touring show and bits of radio and fragments of telly and to write a large and complicated novel and to worry without becoming poorly as a result. I apologise to my workforce – I am a bad self-employer.
And I am trying to make amends: crossing to America by boat has begun to ease the condition my condition is in. I’m aware that some people were incredulous about this travel option, and I’m aware that yet others thought I was simply making an effort towards a niftily upmarket lifestyle choice. If it is a lifestyle choice, then my lifestyle is based on fear – not a desire to join large Germans and orange Brummies on deck three for a duty-free perfume sale. I fear flying and yet I must travel . . . I have solved my problem as best I can and am not pretending to be classy. Plus – for some reason, being rocked to sleep by a potentially fatal ocean while strangers take tutorials in napkin-folding does me no end of good, and there are few things better than sitting on deck – in a deck chair – and chiselling at your novel while blokes in uniforms bring you bouillon. You did not know you wanted bouillon, you are not an habitual bouillon-drinker and yet, ‘Yes, thank you – oh, and crackers. Why not? Thank you again. Can you arrange for the rest of my life to be like this, but not cost me the price of a healthy kidney per week? Or just throw me overboard now. My spine would bless you for it.’ So the novel and I spent a dandy six nights traversing the Atlantic, battering away at the pages and looking out for porpoises. There were rumours of a gannet, but as some of you will know, I have a history with gannets and tried to avoid it.
I am now – in the nicest possible sense – being patronised. A very pleasant individual has offered me (not for the first time) accommodation and food and time in a wooden house with wooden furnishings in a wood. It’s a bit of a wood-themed experience. Writers may not get the freebies and refreshingly frank sexual encounters offered to sportspersons, actors, musicians and politicians, but we do get accommodation. For some reason charities, acquaintances, institutions and collectors of curiosities are often just falling over themselves to give us rooms that aren’t our own. So here I am. I sit and write uninterruptedly during the weeks, and at the weekends I appear at the big house, get proper dinners, say hello and meet people who might want to meet a novelist.
There are many things that are good about my current circumstances: a) I am in a radically different time zone and location from many people who might otherwise want me to write novel-interrupting things, or perform novel-interrupting things for them. b) If you don’t have to cook, clean, shop or attend to your usual life, you will find you have enormous amounts of time to both potter and type. (Suddenly the huge volumes, complicate
d love lives and ornate hobbies of the servant-wielding authors of bygone ages become explicable, if not much less impressive.) c) I am surrounded by scampering animals, alien birds, wiffling greenery, pleasant walks and many of the things that delight my gnarled and weary heart.
Of course, what with me being me, there are also a few drawbacks: a) My extremely palatable surroundings, flexible hours and general lack of any restraints mean that I pass my eccentricity event horizon about three hours after I arrive here. And then I spend hours and hours with people who don’t exist, trying to scribble round them . . . My dress sense (what there was of it) evaporates, my sleeping, eating, strolling, bathing and typing happen at increasingly random points. (Which, when they appear to check on me, can be highly alarming for those people we will have to refer to as ‘the staff’ – although obviously they are not my staff.) I talk to the animals. I talk to the people who don’t exist. I talk to the staff. ‘Hello. Yes. Does this work, I don’t seem to be able to . . . Oh. And when I do that . . . Oh, I shouldn’t do that, then. And what day is it? Oh, meatballs. Great. Sorry for eating with my hands, I’ve lost the fork again. Why are you crying? Well, I’d be wearing more if I hadn’t been in the bath. Sorrysorrysorry . . .’ I celebrated page 250 with a small al-fresco dance involving Mr Hendrix on the extremely effective stereo. I am basically now in a feral condition. b) Even when I’m not in an animal state I don’t really take well to meeting people, and if I am being presented exactly and precisely as a novelist in unknown company, then I tend to come apart like a chocolate hammock. I have, during previous stays, demolished a number of dinner services and sets of glasses with my generally nervous flailings and have not – I feel – given anyone an even passably good impression of writers as a species. c) This is a cabin in the woods. It is, indeed, surrounded by nature. And as soon as the sun goes down, nature spends every moment of darkness scrabbling, thumping, tramping, breathing, creaking and generally impersonating every possible type of assassin. I have never packed a flimsy negligee, high heels and a broken torch for my stays here and so have been unable to ‘just go outside and check on that funny noise’ and therefore I have not been murdered even slightly. I have a functional torch, I have boots, I have my grandpa’s patented self-defence moves, I am surrounded (appropriately) by a large fence. Nevertheless, it has taken me a number of stays here to acclimatise to the bloody racket caused by peaceful countryside.
But mainly I am writing. I sleep soundly because I am deaf with exhaustion, and then I get up and write again and then I write some more and this is lovely. This is what I do, what I always wanted to do. I’m lucky to be here. Patronage isn’t in any way a replacement for proper arts funding – I’m a UK citizen, very temporarily in the US: a land of private funding, of savage poverty and savage wealth – enjoying the effect of an individual’s generous whims on my professional life. In the UK the government we pay for doesn’t want to prevent us from dying or help us to lead even tolerable lives, so you know that arts funding’s a goner. I repeat, I am lucky. Currently lucky and generally lucky. I am able to do something I love and sometimes the circumstances in which I do it are more than pleasant. I would love it anyway, should always remember to love it, and at the moment I have the energy to do so. I wish you all your own versions of the same opportunity – the space to express what you need to express. Onwards.
XXXIV
WELCOME, TO THE 8.35 a.m. train out of Richmond, Virginia – heading for New York and Pennsylvania Station, one of the very few rail termini to have been demolished in the real world and then reconstructed within Satan’s colon. Lately, I have been spending a good deal of time in Penn Station and have wondered – not for the first time – whether 65 per cent of the people waiting for trains there appear to be seriously mentally distressed because they arrived that way, or because they have stepped into an alternative universe of heat, bewilderment, pain and ambient evil. You may be aware that many US rail stations are grand expressions of generous respect to their users, full of stately perpendiculars, handy benches and lots of gold leaf – high-ceilinged temples to mass transit and the communal hopes of a bygone age. Penn Station is there for balance: to remind you that this Depression will not produce a New Deal and that many members of the general public are surplus to requirements, and to hint that your train will travel at the speed of lazy treacle on a cold day, will shudder along rails that even Railtrack would call poorly maintained and that will give priority to freight, cars, pedestrians and any animal above the size of a healthy adult woodchuck.
Yet I continue to love American (and Canadian) trains. I am trying to rebrand my debilitating and expensive fear of flying as Steampunk Travel and – at a certain level – I find I am convincing at least myself that rail transportation is a good and lovely, as well as an ecological, option. US trains are roomy, their passengers have no expectations and therefore often eschew UK train travellers’ lapses into frenzied disappointment and rage when they are delayed, misled or ignored. Plus, US trains are still rich in the iconic elements that I – lover of black-and-white movies that I am – find intoxicating. They are monumental, they still roll majestically into stations with their bells ringing like harbingers of strange mortality, they still hoot across the countryside in the manner of wistful mechanical whales, the conductors still wear little round blue conductors’ hats and the Redcaps still wear red caps – although sometimes they’re baseball caps . . . From my initial exposure to a real live US train around twenty years ago in California I have been in love with them. I can still remember that first high, silver locomotive as it glided and wailed along the sunset into a wood-canopied rural station full of cicada songs and moist heat, and my heart was lost.
Of course, this only slightly mitigates the fact that I am back to business as usual – typing on trains and rattling from city to city, performing readings or the one-person show while trying to keep the novel on track in spite of tiredness and an increasingly cranky spine. This isn’t ideal, but life rarely is, and I’m up over the 300-page line which is a comfort – the pages may not be great, but they are there and I can always rewrite a page that’s there. I would have to make up a page that isn’t there from scratch . . . Currently, of course, the 350-lb gentleman in front of me who is thrashing in his seat, sighing and occasionally exclaiming ‘Phnnah-urr’ isn’t helping matters, but I have come to expect this on trains. Trains are where people speak to themselves with loud enthusiasm, trains are where those listening to MP3 players air-drum without shame, where those not listening to anything do much the same, and trains are where people eat hot dogs made of reconstituted protein substances illegal in many countries.
I can particularly recommend travel from New York to Montreal – the journey takes around eleven hours for no really good reason, beyond a type of shyness that will leave your train hiding, loitering and then simply fainting to a halt at regular intervals. When you are travelling north it will wait like a faithful lover to meet and be passed by the southbound train, and when you are travelling south it will also wait. You will do a great deal of waiting. But you will also be beguiled by the autumn foliage (should it be autumn), the picturesque wetlands and gentle vistas – all slightly distracting if you’re trying to write a sex scene and are already freaked out by your somewhat intrusive surroundings and the fiddly technical matters you have to consider. But you will be able to spot great blue herons and egrets and red-tailed hawks aplenty, as you wonder who should do what to whom first and from which angle.
As usual, it’s much easier to leave the US than to enter it again. On my return, US Border Control began with the usual questions, ‘Are you travelling for business? How long were you in Canada? How long will you be in the US?’ But then escalated to the kind of enquiries I never handle well: ‘What kind of writing? Would I have read you? What kind of novels?’ I find it oddly difficult to give an adequate definition of literary fiction to men with guns, and yet it’s surprising how often they seem to need one. And I am always alarmed when the fi
rst option they reach for as a genre suggestion is, ‘So . . . you write romance?’ This leads me to believe they are poor judges of character and therefore unsuited for their jobs. On this occasion the interrogation moved forward into areas including, ‘What about Braveheart – was that historically accurate?’ Something which could be a normal conversational gambit, but which seems to develop dangerous significance when delivered in a tone one would imagine should be reserved for poorly trained drug-mules and parrot-smugglers. I had no idea if I was being given an opportunity to prove my Scottish credentials or simply chatting with someone unable to not be violently earnest. It was then decided that the carriage ‘smelled weird’ – of course it smelled weird, it’s a railway carriage. After a small discussion about whether the aroma was, in fact, ‘weird’ or ‘just bad’, reinforcements were brought in with inadequate tools and a sniffer dog, travellers were evacuated and the next two hours or so were spent hanging about and listening to the noises of a train car being disassembled.
Meanwhile, my chum with an interest in contemporary fiction and Mel Gibson then loped down the aisle shouting, ‘Scottish novelist?’ in a way that led me to be both nervous and hurt that he hadn’t remembered my face. I then had to present my passport to be rechecked by a more senior and rather languid official, installed in the buffet car. Arrival by boat is rare and therefore leaves unusual traces on one’s passport. I was forced, once again, to reflect on my student days when I had the idea that putting ‘Writer’ in my passport would somehow challenge and unsettle officials of all kinds, prove my interior fortitude, and generally involve me in sticking it to The Man and degrees of personal risk. In fact, I tend to become craven when anywhere near The Man, and The Man, in return, seems to regard my vocation as a mildly amusing indulgence. Writing can, of course, unseat governments, free the soul and prepare the mind and spirit for all possible rigours and joys – but I did not find myself or my vocation especially uplifting as I plodded back from the buffet car to a seriously interfered-with carriage that now smelled both ‘bad’ and ‘of warm Alsatian’.
On Writing Page 13